Texas A&M University is leading a collaboration on a novel “soft-push” technique for diverting hazardous Near Earth Asteroids that is gathering maturity for a future orbital flight test.
NASA’s Ames Research Center and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia are collaborating with Texas A&M Aerospace Engineering Professor David Hyland, as he and his students seek a flight test opportunity as a secondary payload.
“I think it’s the real deal,” says Hyland, who began work on a strategy for gradually altering the course of a distant but threatening asteroid in 1997 while he chaired the department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. As a professor of aerospace and physics at Texas A&M, he has encouraged his students to refine the effort, and they have settled on a diversionary strategy that would alter the path of a NEA barreling toward the Earth by changing its albedo, or reflectivity.
The change would be accomplished with an application of a light or dark surface coating, using an unpiloted probe hovering over the NEA. The strategy depends on a manipulation of the Yarkovsky force, or the thermal emission of protons from the dusk, or warmer, side of a rotating planetary body. It is thought that the emitted protons from a rolling NEA can exert a small propulsive force that could gently change its path.
Four years ago, Hyland began to ask students to develop a mitigation strategy and a flight test, an annual exercise that evolved into the proposed Apophis Mitigation Technology Mission (AMTM). The project borrows its name from 99942 Apophis, a 250-meter wide asteroid that in late 2004 created temporary alarm over the possibility of a regionally devastating collision with the Earth in 2029. Subsequent observations eased those concerns but raised the prospect that the Earth’s gravity would alter the path of Apophis just enough on that pass to set up a possible impact in early 2036.
Those concerns have since diminished as well, but the well-studied NEA offers a suitable test target, Hyland says.
The students responded to his challenge with the Surface Albedo Treatment Subsystem, a Triboelectric charging apparatus that could apply a light or dark powder coating on Apophis to alter its albedo enough to produce a three-Earth-radius dispersion by 2036.
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